Jessie Keane - Lawless

Ruby’s brain was in turmoil. She had spent a wretched night again, wondering if at any moment the phone was going to ring and it would be the hospital, saying Your son is dead, he passed peacefully away, we’re so sorry.

She had been afraid to sleep, afraid to even lie on the bed, as if that might be inviting disaster. Now, hyped up on coffee and dazed from lack of sleep, she sat there and wondered what the hell was happening to her life.

Thomas

Michael

Kit

What Thomas had told her – that Michael had been unfaithful – devastated her. It had never occurred to her; in all the time they’d been together, not once had he given her cause to doubt him. And she had been utterly faithful to him. Had he lived, they would have married. Yet here was Thomas, telling her that Michael had betrayed her.

She had asked him to tell her who the woman was. ‘Come on. You know everything, don’t you?’

‘Sweetheart, I don’t know that.’

Maybe he was lying. If Michael could have lied to her, then so could Thomas. And that shocking thing he’d told her about the Danieri girl, Bianca, the one Kit seemed, according to Rob, to have become obsessed with…

She sank her head into her hands as she thought about Thomas. How easily he had reeled her in, how volatile and passionate their sudden affair was; how inappropriate. What was she thinking, getting involved with a cold-blooded crook like him? A man of secrets, a man who watched, who took note, who waited with the patience of a spider for Michael to come to grief, so that he could snatch her for himself.

And now Kit was lying in a hospital bed, teetering between life and death. She cast a fearful look at the phone. What if it rang, and they told her he was gone? She would never have the chance to make things right with him, never know the joy of having him love her as desperately as she loved him.

‘I’ll phone Joan,’ said Daisy, watching her mother with concern. ‘Tell her you won’t be in to work for a while.’

Ruby nodded, wiping away the tears that were streaming down her face.

She couldn’t think about work. Couldn’t even form a sentence. All she could do was cry.

Kit was surrounded by icy windblown blackness. There was nobody there but him, and this faint but biting pain, chilling him, eating into him like frostbite. He could hear murmurings, far away. Could be from another world, it was so distant, so unconnected to anything that was happening with him. There was not a thought in his head, there was simply… nothing. So this was what it was like. This was death.

‘Do you think he can hear me? Really?’ Ruby asked the nurse. She was staring at Kit’s face, so still in repose. Not the flicker of an eyelid. He looked dead to the world.

They let you in, mornings, in ICU. After all, the person laid up in here might not make it. It was a special consideration for the relatives, to be allowed in. The monitors beeped, pumps wheezed; this really was intensive care. It was a different nurse this time, a neat little pigtailed blonde. But she had the same smile. Patient. Kind.

‘Try it. Talk to him.’

So Ruby gulped, cleared her throat. Felt foolish, didn’t know where to begin. She started telling her son about living through the war, with a father who seemed to hate everything about her and with brothers, Charlie and Joe, who ducked and dived.

‘Joe was the nicer of the two,’ she told Kit.

She told him about the Windmill Theatre, and about Vi and about Cornelius Bray – the father Kit had never known, the father who had lavished whatever love he had upon Daisy, having washed his hands of his unacceptable and illegitimate dark-skinned son.

When she stopped talking, pouring her heart out to the man lying unconscious in the bed, the little blonde nurse was standing beside her, arms folded, listening. The nurse blinked; her eyes looked faintly red.

‘I hope he can hear you,’ she said.

Ruby nodded, and wiped at her eyes. She didn’t think he could. ‘Let’s hope,’ she said.

‘Keep at it,’ said the nurse.

Ruby did.

Daisy phoned Joan and told her to pass a memo round to all the heads of department that Ruby wouldn’t be available for a while, probably the next fortnight, who knew? But they were to carry on as normal, and if there were any problems they couldn’t manage, they were to inform Joan, and Joan would phone the Marlow house. Then Daisy would see what she could do to resolve them.

‘You?’ asked Joan, looking up from her notepad in surprise when Daisy said this.

‘Yes, or I’ll pass it on to Ruby if she’s OK to take it. If not, it’ll be down to me. Is that all right?’

‘I’m sure it will be,’ said Joan.

Bianca didn’t know what to do with herself. She had gone back to work, back to Dante’s, but her mind was all over the place.

I’ve killed him , she thought, over and over.

The man she loved, the one she had thought loved her, she had finished him, taken his life. If the police came and got her, hauled her away to a cell, she knew she deserved it, she would almost relish it. Instead, life went on. Life dragged on. And the everyday mechanics of living exhausted her.

She waited for the police to come, for that knock on the door in the middle of the night.

You did it. You’re guilty. You ought to suffer.

And she was suffering. Every ghastly, endless day was a waking nightmare, during which she went through the motions of doing what she had done before she met him, the same endless drag of days, none of it having any meaning now that everything had changed. Nothing would ever be the same again.

‘You OK?’ Cora kept asking her.

‘I’m fine.’

And then, even worse: ‘Did you ever catch up with that Tony Mobley character?’

‘No. No, I didn’t.’

At night she lay sleepless in her bed, remembering the feel of his body against hers, the sweet sharp scent of him. She looked at the pills in the bathroom cabinet, thought about ending it. But then she thought of her mother. Bella’d had enough grief to last a lifetime, she couldn’t inflict still more on her.

Vittore phoned, just once. ‘You OK there?’ he asked his sister.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him, same as she told everybody. She knew she should stop there, but the question nagged at her, the one she ought to ask, the one she had to ask, even though it would make him angry. ‘Have you heard anything? Is he…?’

Dead.

She braced herself for his answer.

Vittore was silent for long moments. ‘He’s in hospital, he’s holding on, they say.’

Bianca slumped down onto her chair, pressing a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. Her ears hummed, the world went momentarily black: he was alive .

‘If he should pull through, this could get bad,’ said Vittore.

‘What?’ He was alive. That was all she could think about. Tears flooded down her face like a waterfall. She was half-crying, half-laughing, thinking, Oh, thank God it’s true he’s alive, he’s alive!

‘They say he’s out of it for now. But if he comes round, he’ll name you, won’t he?’

She wiped at her eyes, shuddering. He ought to name her. What she had done had been done in a moment of supreme madness, and if he were to recover, then she didn’t care what happened to her any more, let her be punished, she didn’t care about that.

‘You got your passport up to date?’ asked Vittore.

‘What? Well… yes.’

‘You may have to go.’

Bianca was shaking her head. She’d done an awful thing, a crazy thing, but the madness was past now, she could see things more clearly.